I lay for some time hesitating and actually trembling, until the agony of suspense became too strong for endurance.

I opened my eyes and fixed them upon the dreaded object.

Upon the table lay what seemed to me a corpse, wrapped about in the wintry habiliments of the grave, the corpse of my friend.
(William Hone, celebrated for his antiquarian researches, has given a distinct and highly interesting account of spectral illusion, in his own experience, in his Every Day Book.

The artist Cellini has made a similar statement.) "For a moment, the circumstances of time and place were forgotten; and the spectre seemed to me a natural reality, at which I might sorrow, but not wonder.

The utter fallacy of this idea was speedily detected; and then I endeavored to consider the present vision, like those which had preceded it, a mere delusion, a part of the phenomena of opium eating.
I accordingly closed my eyes for an instant, and then looked again in full expectation that the frightful object would no longer be visible.
It was still there; the body lay upon its side; the countenance turned full towards me,--calm, quiet, even beautiful, but certainly that of death: 'Ere yet Decay's effacing fingers Had swept the lines where Beauty lingers' and the white brow, and its light shadowy hair, and the cold, still familiar features lay evident and manifest to the influx of the strengthening twilight.